BossConsole

<div align="center"> <img src="docs/boss-logo.png" alt="BOSS" width="128" height="128" />

🔬 The operator's console for AI agents - and the scientists who direct them

The first open-source, multi-platform harness for AI agents - an evolvable toolbox for agents and the humans they work with.

🧪 Built for enterprises, science, and research.

⚡ Natively multi-threaded - built on the JVM, not Electron - with live hot-reload and laptop-to-supercomputer scale.

Bring your own agent - Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or OpenCode - and give it a real browser, terminal, editor, secrets, and automation. Then decide exactly what each one is allowed to touch. Run it on your own machine, hand a live terminal to your phone with a QR code, and reshape any tool - by hand or by the agent itself - while the app keeps running.

⬇ Download · 📊 Compare · ⚡ Browser benchmark · 🤖 Run an agent · 🔐 Governance · 🧰 Toolbox · 🖥️ BossTerm

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Just want to download BOSS? Head to BossConsole-Releases for pre-built installers.

Built with Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform, BOSS unifies an embedded browser, a blazing-fast shareable terminal, a code editor, an extensible Toolbox of plugins, and a governed MCP tool layer into one desktop workspace for complex, AI-assisted work.

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How BOSS compares

Every other AI-agent desktop app and agentic IDE - Claude Desktop, OpenAI Codex, Google Antigravity, Cursor, and Windsurf/Devin - is closed source, and most lock you to a single vendor's model. BOSS is the first open-source, multi-platform harness in the category: Apache-2.0, cross-platform, and built to run any agent.

The deeper difference: BOSS is both the agent's home and an agent-operable app. The same MCP layer your agent uses to do work also exposes BOSS itself - its tabs, terminals, browser, editor, git, secrets, and automation - as 100+ mcp__boss__* tools. Read-only tools (list tabs, read a pane's output, tail the console, snapshot performance, inspect git) give an agent live situational awareness of the workspace; action tools let it act on what it finds. So the agent doesn't just chat about your code - it perceives the running app and drives it, carrying out multi-step tasks autonomously.

And unlike most of the field, BOSS bundles a real embedded browser - Fluck - the agent can navigate, script, and automate (browser_navigate, browser_run_js, plus record-and-replay RPA), with logins filled from the Secret Manager and never handed to the model.

It's also native, not Electron. BOSS runs on the JVM with true multithreading and hot-reloads plugins at runtime - so an agent can evolve a tool and see it live, without restarting the app - while Claude Desktop and the VS Code-fork IDEs (Antigravity, Cursor, Windsurf/Devin) run on a single-threaded JavaScript event loop.

| | BOSS | Claude Desktop | Codex | Google Antigravity | Cursor | Windsurf / Devin | |---|:--:|:--:|:--:|:--:|:--:|:--:| | Open source | ✅ Apache-2.0 | ❌ | △ CLI only¹ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | | Bring any agent / model | ✅ BYO agent | ❌ Claude only | ❌ OpenAI only | ✅ multi | ✅ multi + BYOK | ✅ multi + BYOK | | MCP tools | ✅ 100+ built-in | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | | Embedded browser (agent-driven) | ✅ Fluck | △ Computer Use² | ❌ | ✅ + DevTools | ❌ | ❌ | | Integrated terminal | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | | Share terminal session (QR / multi-user / E2E) | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | | Per-tool governance (RBAC + kill-switch) | ✅ | △³ | △³ | △³ | △ Teams | △ Enterprise | | Plugin ecosystem | ✅ Toolbox store | △ MCP extensions | △ IDE ext. | ✅ VS Code ext. | ✅ VS Code ext. | ✅ VS Code ext. | | Hot-reload / evolvable at runtime | ✅ live plugins + Tool Evolver | ❌ | ❌ | △⁵ | △⁵ | △⁵ | | Runtime | JVM, multi-threaded | Electron / JS⁶ | Rust (CLI) | Electron / JS⁶ | Electron / JS⁶ | Electron / JS⁶ | | Platforms | mac · Win · Linux (x64+ARM64) | mac · Win · Linux (beta) | mac · Win · Linux⁴ | mac · Win · Linux | mac · Win · Linux | mac · Win · Linux |

_{✅ yes · △ partial/limited · ❌ no.  ¹ Only OpenAI's Codex CLI is open source (Apache-2.0); the Codex desktop app is proprietary.  ² Claude Desktop's "Computer Use" controls the whole screen rather than bundling a scriptable in-app browser.  ³ Enterprise-plan admin controls exist, but fine-grained per-tool RBAC isn't documented.  ⁴ Codex CLI is cross-platform; the desktop app is macOS/Windows.  ⁵ VS Code-fork IDEs reload extensions via a full window reload; none offers BOSS-style live plugin hot-reload + agent-driven tool evolution.  ⁶ Claude Desktop and the VS Code-fork IDEs run on Electron (Chromium + Node.js) - a single-threaded JavaScript event loop with worker/child-process offloading; BOSS runs natively on the JVM with true multithreading.  Compiled from public sources, July 2026 - these products move fast, so corrections are welcome via issue or PR.}

Browser performance

We ran Speedometer 3.1 on the BOSS Fluck browser and five desktop browsers on the same M3 Max Mac. Each reported median below comes from three 10-iteration runs; higher is better.

| Browser | Observed median | |---|---:| | BOSS Fluck browser | 47.9 | | Comet | 46.2 | | Google Chrome | 35.5 | | ChatGPT Atlas | 34.6 | | Safari | 29.9¹ | | Firefox | 22.5² |

Treat Fluck and Comet as tied within measurement precision. A follow-up experiment alternated them back-to-back three times: Fluck led each pair, but its 3.4% median margin was within the browsers' own run-to-run spread and was not statistically significant (p = 0.125). The durable signal is that Fluck and Comet both scored roughly 30% above Chrome and Atlas in these conditions.

Absolute scores were depressed by heavy co-tenancy - 800–1300% ambient CPU, including roughly four cores from a running Docker Desktop VM - so compare browsers within this experiment, not against published scores from quiet machines. Read the full benchmark report for the paired test, per-suite analysis, discarded runs, and caveats; the reproducible harness, per-run JSON, and screenshot evidence are committed alongside it.

_{¹ Safari used a live profile with existing tabs and extensions, so it is not comparable to the fresh-profile runs.  ² Firefox varied by 40% across its three runs; its median is the least stable result.}

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Contents

• How BOSS compares
• Browser performance
• Downloads
• Why BOSS
• Run any AI coding agent
• You decide what your agents can touch
• MCP - give agents real tools
• Toolbox - an app store inside the app
• BossTerm - a terminal you can share to any device
• Case study: the DNA Origami Inventor
• Design System
• Development
• CLI & Agent Harness · CI/CD · Documentation · Open source & ecosystem

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Downloads

| Platform | Architecture | Download | |----------|--------------|----------| | macOS | Universal (Apple Silicon + Intel) | Homebrew | DMG | | Windows | x64 | MSI | | Windows | ARM64 | MSI | | Linux | AMD64 | DEB | RPM | JAR | | Linux | ARM64 | DEB | RPM | JAR |

Download links always fetch the newest release directly, via the latest-release edge function - no API key needed, and not subject to GitHub's 60-request/hour limit for unauthenticated callers. Release metadata as JSON - version, assets, sha256 checksums - is at ?app=boss. Prereleases are excluded by default; add &prerelease=true to consider them, or &channel=beta (alpha, rc) to track one channel. To browse or pin a specific version, see BossConsole-Releases.

A browser resolves the redirect and saves the versioned filename. Command-line tools do not: there is no Content-Disposition header, so curl -O would name the file after the URL's last path segment - latest-release. Pass a name explicitly, curl -fL -o boss.dmg "<link>".

Quick Install

# macOS (Homebrew - Recommended)
brew install --cask boss

# macOS/Linux (Universal Script)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/risa-labs-inc/BossConsole-Releases/main/install.sh | bash

# Windows (PowerShell)
iwr -useb https://raw.githubusercontent.com/risa-labs-inc/BossConsole-Releases/main/install.ps1 | iex

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Why BOSS

• 🤖 Bring your own agent - run Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or OpenCode in a BOSS terminal and give them a real toolset (browser, files, git, shell, secrets, automation) over MCP.
• 🧰 Extensible by design - a built-in Toolbox plugin store; the terminal, editor, and browser are themselves hot-loadable plugins, and you can scaffold your own with an AI agent.
• 🔐 You stay in control - server-enforced role-based access control, a per-user kill-switch for every agent tool, and user-scoped secrets. You decide exactly what an agent can call.
• 🖥️ A terminal built to share - hand a live terminal session to your phone via QR, or to a teammate over an end-to-end-encrypted link, with view-only or full control.
• ⚡ Fast and native - Compose Multiplatform desktop app with the built-in Fluck browser, on macOS, Windows, and Linux (x64 + ARM64).
• ⚙️ Multi-threaded, built to scale - truly multi-threaded on the JVM (not a single-threaded Electron/JS event loop), with an out-of-process microkernel architecture engineered to run from a laptop to a supercomputer.

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Run any AI coding agent

BOSS is agent-agnostic. Open a terminal, launch your preferred CLI, and - once attached - it gains the boss toolset automatically.

| Agent | Binary | Attach method | |-------|--------|---------------| | Claude Code | claude | claude mcp add --scope user --transport sse boss <url> | | Codex | codex | `cod